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BlueShore Financial

BlueShore Financial (BlueShore) is a strong and vibrant financial institution with $1.7 billion in assets under administration, 40,000 members and 12 branches. For over the last 70 years, BlueShore has offered banking, insurance, investment and business services. They are an innovative organization that attributes their success to adapting products to the needs of their members.

BlueShore Financial is committed to being an industry leader while contributing to the community as a socially, ethically and environmentally responsible organization. Their credo states “We must encourage and support co-operation throughout our business, recognizing that the results of our collective efforts exceed the sum of our individual efforts.”

Situation

BlueShore’s recent growth highlighted the importance of investing in a financial management system that would support management and administrative operations. Reporting out of BlueShore’s aging financial system was their greatest pain. They described their system as “inefficient and out of date.” Capabilities were limited and modifications expensive, forcing them to extract data from the mainframe through the Trial Balance and into Microsoft Excel for financial reporting.

Staff liked the flexibility of Excel, but spreadsheets had become too big and unwieldy, and external links took up a lot of memory. “As we looked forward with the planned growth of the organization, we realized the serious future limitations utilizing Excel beyond its intended capabilities,” said Ejaz Sadaruddin, Vice President and CFO. These slow, lengthy processes cost valuable time, meaning data was only extracted once a month.

BlueShore had outgrown their system and knew that before any further expansion could happen, a change in their financial system would be necessary. They began searching for a new solution. As a business strategy, BlueShore wanted to expand by adding branches without an increase in finance staff and they wanted to build a foundation for improved performance reporting. Additionally, after decades of being tied to a mainframe service, self-sufficiency was high on the priority list.

Solution

BlueShore selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV to replace their existing financial application. The implementation was an “on time, on budget” success and an almost textbook example of effective client and consultant cooperation. “The implementation team was there when we needed them, even if it was at a moment’s notice,” said Tosha Silver, Assistant Controller.

On Dynamics NAV, BlueShore’s data is much more accessible to users, who can query and filter data on screen, or drill-down to details. “We now have information stored in a central database allowing us to quickly query data to generate reports and publish to Excel,” indicates Emily Watkins, Assistant Controller. “The users found it easy to use.” BlueShore also invested in custom development to tailor Dynamics NAV to their unique requirements. An integration from the banking system was also created that imports 15,000 general journal lines each day and incorporated a matching process for bank reconciliation transactions.

Benefits

The CFO states “BlueShore helps their members achieve financial wellness. Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV positions NSCU for growth and lays the foundation for realizing our dream of an integrated solution for reporting and analytics. Selecting the Microsoft SQL database also supports the organization-wide reporting improvement initiative. We look forward to building more reports that query across databases to provide greater insight into product and member relationships”.